


Übertragung

by luffywhatelse



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003), Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Post Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Brotherly Relationship, Dark, From earth to the moon, Homesick, Melancholy, Sad, Sickness, conqueror of shamballa, fma, rocket science - Freeform, sick, transference
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-13
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:40:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22697260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luffywhatelse/pseuds/luffywhatelse
Summary: The Croatian coast had opened wide walls of amber rock, gray water and a leaden sky bathed in a blue and gold sunset before his eyes. A cold breeze was blowing that day, heavy with salt.Through Ljubljana, the city of dragons, and new Budapest, the borders of Romania had risen unexpectedly in dark forests, arches and stony spiers raised to make the sky appear jagged. The land of Transylvania doesn't know mildness, doesn't know what the sun is: it's a place of rugged peaks and crystal lakes, with swollen streams of green water.Edward had liked it from the first moment."You're here to build the rocket, then."Alfons' eyes light up, sparkling with enthusiasm:"Yeah! And you...?"Ed tilts his head to one side with an interrogative expression, and Alfons asks him: "Are you here for the rocket too?"- I'm here for my brother. - He thinks. - My brother who has your face. My brother, because I promised him we would meet again. -Ed smiles. With the tip of the fork he draws a perfect circle on the white tablecloth."I'm here for the stars." He says.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 39





	1. Chapter 1

**La distance est un vain mot**

The Croatian coast had opened wide walls of amber rock, gray water and a leaden sky bathed in a blue and gold sunset before his eyes. A cold breeze was blowing that day, heavy with salt.

Through Ljubljana, the _city of dragons_ , and new Budapest, the borders of Romania had risen unexpectedly in dark forests, arches and stony spiers raised to make the sky appear jagged. The land of Transylvania doesn't know mildness, doesn't know what the sun is: it's a place of rugged peaks and crystal lakes, with swollen streams of green water. 

Edward had liked it from the first moment.

  
**1.**

On the first day of travel, his face pressed against the window to watch the rain, Edward wonders how the stars can be studied in a place where the sky is not even visible: but that night the storm takes away the clouds.

The galaxy is a very white swarm, fragments of glass and pieces of glistening silver scattered on the black velvet sky. There are no cities to stain the dark with their lights. Ed leans his forehead against the cold glass and closes his eyes. For a moment the sky above his head has different constellations, another name. 

There is Alphonse, somewhere there, watching it with him.

  
**9.**

_Impossible impossible impossible impossible impossible, is it..._  
"My name is Alfons Heiderich."  
_... possible?_

Ed would blatantly stare at him if he wasn't afraid of looking weird, and he just doesn't want to look weird. Not to him. Not to - _he looks just like Al._

While having dinner with all the other researchers, Edward observes the image of Alfons reflected in the shiny metal jug in front of him: the square chin makes his - otherwise delicate - features more sharp; blond hair, fair skin. His eyes are not like Al's, they have the color of the lakes of Romania, the blue-green sea of the Slovenian islands instead of brown. But they have the same mild, proud and stubborn kindness.

He's tall. Seeing his little brother has grown tall is a spiteful and surprising punishment to his ego, but Ed thinks he can tolerate it: anything, as long as he's allowed to see him.

_It's not Al. It's not Al, but he looks like him._

"So you study the stars."

Alfons smiles at him.

"I'm an aerospace engineer."

"Aerospace?" he plays with the cutlery while looking at him.

He sees Alfons laughing at his question. 

_Would Al laugh like that?_ The last time he saw him laughing - before the armor - he was nine years old and had a thin and childlike neck; on Alfons' neck he can see his Adam's apple jerking slightly. He has a veil of golden beard on his smooth skin.

Alfons stops laughing to observe him with a somewhat perplexed curiosity:

"Is that a real question?"

"Yes, I'm very serious."

Alfons looks like he's thinking about it. Maybe he wonders if Ed's making fun of him.

"An aerospace engineer designs, tests, and supervises the manufacture of aircraft, spacecraft, rockets... tests prototypes to make sure they function according to design and develops new technologies."

He knows what an engineer is: someone like Winry. There are big machines here, machines that fly and machines that do jobs that, in Amestris, not even men want to do. Engineers build machines.

For a moment he thinks that Alfons would probably like to see the mechanisms of his arm and leg.

"You're here to build the rocket, then."

Alfons' eyes light up, sparkling with enthusiasm:

"Yeah! And you...?"

Ed tilts his head to one side with an interrogative expression, and Alfons asks him: "Are you here for the rocket too?"

_I'm here for my brother. My brother who has your face. My brother, because I promised him we would meet again._

Ed smiles. With the tip of the fork he draws a perfect circle on the white tablecloth.

"I'm here for the stars." He says.

  
**14.**

"This is a convergent-divergent nozzle, see?" Crouching at the bottom of the rocket, Alfons points out to him the space where the exhaust gases escape, tapping gently with a wrench against the heavy metal edge. Edward leans over to see it better.

"Professor Goddard was the first to think it could be used like this. We're still trying to stabilize it to get the right gas velocity when passing through the bottleneck, but I think we're almost there."

And then, looking up with bright eyes and a cheerful smile:  
  
"It will fly. We can use it to touch the moon, Ed."

Not even the moon of that world is his moon, Edward thinks. It has craters that he doesn't recognize, a face that is not familiar to him. Not even the moon is far enough away, they have to go further, beyond: but Alfons is smiling at him, and he cannot do anything but return.

"Do you want to go see it up close?" Ed asks after a while.

Alfons is lying on his back, wedged between the rocket and the floor, and is now tightening one of the bottom bolts.

"What, Ed ...?"

"The moon. Do you want to see it up close?"

"Not... not exactly. Can you pass me a wrench?"

Ed sits on the ground, not caring for the soot that immediately dirties up his light trousers, and hands him the requested wrench.

" _Not exactly_ it's a vague answer, Al... " He hesitates. "Do you mind if I call you that?"

Alfons' face, dirty with dusty black, leans out of the engine to look at him. He always smiles brightly and looks happy.

"Of course not. I'm glad."

 _That's not Al. He isn't Al. He's got his name, he's got his face, but he's not Al_. He's the Al of this place, the place he wants to leave. Calling him as his brother - thinking of him as his brother - is not wise.

"Al." He repeats anyway.  
It's not wise but he can't help it. "So? Why are you so interested in launching this rocket?"

Alfons disappears under the engine again, and his voice sounds muffled and metallic: "Because someday we'll all walk on the moon, Ed. Have you ever read From Earth to the Moon?"

Edward has no idea what it is.

"Well, it's a novel my father gave me when I was ten years old, and... if you haven't read it you can't understand what it was for me. There will be houses on the moon someday. People will live there. We will have cities on the moon, we will sail from there and travel to the stars, and I want to be part of all this."

A moment of silence, before he ends saying:  
"If I cannot be like the protagonist of that book, I will at least be the person who has paved the way for him."

Ed would like to ask why Alfons thinks he can't be him - and why, above all, his voice sounds so indescribably sad while he talks about it - but then Alfons asks him to pass him another wrench and the conversation is over.

He gets the answer to his question the same evening, anyway, in the form of an unexpected blood stain on the handkerchief pressed against Alfons' mouth.

If you have a fatal lung disease, you don't have enough life to touch the moon.


	2. Chapter 2

**Rien ne s'est fait de grand**   
**qui ne soit une espérance exagérée.**

**.22**

At the beginning of the third week they're walking the streets of Sibiu when Alfons suddenly goes to a large library with dusty windows; five minutes later he comes out with a package in his hands and a scroll under his arm.

"For you." He says, throwing everything in Ed's hands.

In the package there's a brass sextant. The scroll is a map of the sky: there are many names of stars that Ed doesn't know written in a language that Alfons claims to be Latin, the constellations are drawn in gray lines on a blue background.

"I can't bring you closer to the stars than this _for now_ , so please be satisfied." Alfons laughs.

Edward has got a lump in his throat, something as heavy as a stone. He grabs Alfons by the arm and drags him back to the library to return the favour.

They find the stories of The Mysterious Island on the bottom shelf. It's a German edition. Alfons has never read it before.

  
**.38**

Alfons sleeps quietly, but all at once, during his sleep, his respiration becomes difficult and loud; he coughs frequently.

Outside the window is full of clouds and stars: they seem so close that he can touch them but instead, even if he tries to grab them with his metal hand, he always finds his fingers clenching nothing but air.

It could take decades for the rocket. It may never fly. It could fly, but only a hundred years from now, and he'll be dead by then.

Alphonse is always there, only on the other side of the stars, but tonight it seems impossible to get there.

Sitting on the windowsill, he brings his knees to his chest and clasps his arms around his legs to make himself as small and warm as possible. If he closes his eyes, deeply immersed in the leaden and liquefied silence of the sleeping house, he only hears the irregular beat of his heart.

Ed doesn't know whose body he occupies now. He recognizes the scars, the missing limbs, all the marks on his back and then that other mark, on his belly, through which death has entered. It's a body like his. But his body may have been lost inside the Portal. This one could have been done from the body of the other Edward who was crushed by the blimp. It could be...

... It may have been done from Al's body.

Is it his heartbeat that he's hearing?

Echoes from the real world (his world) are lost in those walls.

  
**.53**

"Do you think there is another world besides this?"

"Are you talking about Heaven, Ed? I thought you..."

"It's not a paradise. There is war, and people taking advantage of it, and a lot of cheaters, liars and crooks. Even good people lie."

"... Ed?"

  
**.54**

"Is the place where you come from, Ed?"

"It's the _world_ I come from."

Alfons believes him, Ed thinks. Oh, Alfons believes him: at least a part of him - yes - is convinced of it.

And that's the problem.

  
**.55**

"Would you like to do something to get back there?"

"I'm... I'm here for this."

"For the rocket? Do you think..."

"I don't know."

"But you said there is war there, and there is not here. Why would you want to go back?"

He has left too many things behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Rien ne s'est fait de grand qui ne soit une espérance exagérée" means: Nothing great has been done that is not an exaggerated hope.


	3. Chapter 3

**La liberté est un bien immense,  
mais qu'on ne peut goûter qu'à la condition de vivre.**

**.63**

They no longer talked about Ed's world.

Today there is the first rocket test launch and they're all out looking at the sky. The clouds glide through the mountains, descend to the valley, touch the ground. The sun is missing: but it's also beautiful, it's more silver than gray, in a seasonless twilight that crosses the rocky vertebrae of Romania.

With his eyes on Alfons' neck, Edward is the only one who doesn't look at the sky.

For a moment, he says to himself that it's just tension, it's natural. But he knows it's actually only because he'll understand what's happening anyway. All he needs is just catching a glimpse of Alfons' face from the position he has chosen: it will be enough for him to understand if he's smiling or if he's upset. _That's Al. He's Al._ He knows him as he knows himself.

He realizes what he's thinking and cringes.

 _Oh, damn._ He did it again.  
  
_It's not Al, it's not Al._

"You didn't watch the launch," Alfons murmurs that night in his room.

Edward doesn't look at him: he keeps his eyes fixed on the book and gives a slight shrug. He thinks he might end the conversation like this, but then Alfons turns to him; Ed peeks over the pages without being noticed and finds the saddest shoulders he has ever seen.

Damn.

"There was no point in staying," he explains quietly. "I knew it would be all right: you built that engine, didn't you?

If it were Al he would look at him with disappointment, now. He would say something like _I won't buy it, Nii-san_ , or he wouldn't say anything and just frown at him. But that's not Al, it's Alfons, who unwillingly bends his head to one side and smiles at him:

"It's not fair you do this to me, Ed. It's called cheating."

They are both cheating, Edward thinks. It's a relief when he sees him lie down on the bed, look at him and smile at him. Alfons has no roughness, no edges.

They're both cheating: it's just that Alfons is not aware of it. He can't be, because Ed hasn't told him about Al yet. He doesn't know if he ever will.

  
**.72**

Alfons coughs his soul out, sometimes. One of those hard dry coughs which seem to shake and tear the chest and make those who hear it say, _he has not long to live_. Generally, in the light of the sun it's much better, and there are days when it's like you can forget he has a lung disease. But the nights are a completely different story. They always seem infinitely long to Ed.

Crossing the night until dawn, with Alfons trying to take a breath in long hissing gasps - it looks like he sucks water rather than air -, is unbearable.

Winry was good at dealing with weak, sick, injured people. Winry had a gentle touch, a sweet voice. Winry is an open wound of nostalgia every time he thinks about her.

Winry who fixed him, Winry who gave him an arm and a leg and who helped him to get back on his feet, like a goddess. She was good at dealing with sick people, but Ed is a disaster. He feels pain and a pinch of panic buried in the middle of everything else, afraid of doing or saying the wrong thing, afraid of being useless. He would like to help Alfons. He would like to empty his lungs of liquid and blood, drain him out and force him to spit out everything that is rotten inside him, heal him, but he can't; and then, painfully, he thinks that it's just like letting Al to rot.

He wakes up when he hears him coughing: he remains with his eyes wide open as the crisis starts hesitantly, with the first coughs, then begins to overwhelm him, it becomes exacerbated, scratches his throat and bronchi, everything, reaches its peak and it seems that Alfons is choking; then the cough loosens his grip, slowly, and Ed feels like crying hearing Alfons' breath full of relief.

Edward can't go back to sleep. He would like to sleep: to close his eyes and dream. In his dreams he always comes back, there is a desert full of light and his beautiful Resembool, then the clouds and a shimmering hand raised to shield him from the sun. There is Al laughing and, somewhere, Winry skipping rope. Someone hands him a silver watch, taunts him, but then he's standing near a waterfall and the same person who has fiercely mocked him for years is asking him why Ed didn't trust him. He tells Ed he has to trust him. That he will protect him. 

Edward doesn't remember that anyone after Trisha ever said anything like that to him. From that moment, it feels like two lifetimes, not just one: a life as a child without milk and without a father, then a life with a steel arm and an armor as a brother. This is the third, his third life.

Maybe he'll have nine, like cats. Nine lives to go through, another six lives before the end, another six million people for whom he should suffer.

He listens to Alfons' breathing until morning.

If he stays awake, he has the impression of being able to literally grab the cough if he will hear it coming back, of being able to squeeze and strangle it, so that it will leave him alone.

  
**.81**

The day of the second test launch is one of those days when Alfons doesn't seem to have a lung disease. This time they both look up to the sky, and Ed is next to him in the front row. There is a very thin ray of sunshine that filters through the clearer clouds.

Alfons' shoulder - the shoulder of Al, Alphonse, his little brother - is four inches higher than his.

But it's supposed to be there.

Four inches closer to the sky.

  
**.88**

One morning, Edward wakes up because the sunlight hit his face - it passes through the windows and there is a perfectly blue sky, today, like water, like crystal, it looks like it's the first morning of fine weather that he has seen since he arrived in Romania. He still has in mind the memory of his last dream.

There was Al, for sure. They walked together and the rocket flew over their heads: he had turned to his brother to tell him, to explain that he had made it, just for him, that he had traveled, just for him, and then he had realized that the boy next to him wasn't Al, but Alfons.

But he had felt no guilt or sadness at the thought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "La liberté est un bien immense, mais qu'on ne peut goûter qu'à la condition de vivre" means: Freedom is an immense good, but you can only taste it if you live.


	4. Chapter 4

**Les drames les plus poignants**   
**sont ceux de la pensée.**

**.94**

"I could read you something."  
Alfons has a fever tonight. The cough comes and goes as usual but, every time it comes, it has the appearance of a discontented mistress: persistent, fierce and bad.

"You should sleep, Ed," Alfons kindly objects to his proposal. "Really. It's almost dawn."

"I'm not very sleepy. We could read, uh... what book is this?"

He drew a random book out of the pile. Alfons has dozens, tons of books but Edward is strangely not attracted to them: the fact is that they are not essays, nothing to do with knowledge and study, but novels and tales of a world that doesn't belong to him. He doesn't know them. They annoy him. This world looks nothing like Amestris. This world doesn't know his fairy tales.

" _War and peace_ ," there is a hint of fun in Alfons' hoarse, tired voice, and when Ed turns to look at him, he sees him smile. He has a candid smile, as always, lost in his sweating flushed face. "A little light reading."

Edward weighs the book in his hands: "It actually would make a good doorstop. Let me get you another one."

"I've already read them all. If you really don't want to sleep, can't we just... talk?"

Alfons proposes it with a kind of dim uncertainty, but Edward hurriedly puts away the book, feeling infinitely relieved: 

"Sure! What would you like to talk about?"

"I don't know." Uncertainty again.

Ed doesn't know either. They could talk about the rocket, but they already talk about it every day, every hour, at all times: it's the thought that drags them both forward, because Alfons wants to be able to touch the stars before he dies, Ed is tracing a way back home by connecting those stars, one by one, with a pen and a screwdriver.

They could talk about... what? Their lives peters out in the rocket. Their lives end just beyond the stars.

"Then I could tell you something," Edward proposes in the end, and Alfons looks interested. It's that interest, more than anything else, that pushes him to add at once: "A few stories."

"Any story of yours?"

 _Any story of yours_. The need in his voice is crystal clear. _Some story of the other side. Some story, any story, anything that brings me a little bit closer to you, just a little bit more._

Alfons is also trying to create a path: but his path ends just around the corner, crashing into a dead end.

Edward knows it, Edward knows it very well: but he pushes a chair towards Al's bed and, instead of sitting on it, he settles on the mattress and stretches his legs to rest his feet comfortably on the seat.

"My brother and I were once sent by the Colonel to a mining town. You know, the Colonel is a weird guy: he's arrogant and unbearable, bossy and also kind of stupid. And he lies. He always lies. But he's not a bad person when you got used to it. Anyway: we arrived in this city and there was..."

  
**.95**

When Edward tells his stories, Alfons doesn't cough.

Maybe he found a way to throttle his disease, Ed thinks.

  
**.96**

Again he dreams of Alfons and Alphonse. During the day he continues to draw roads for the stars but, at night and in the dark, the stars are covered with clouds. There is the gray sky of Romania above their heads. All three look at it together and Alfons and Alphonse's breathing is the same, their beat is one beat.

Edward knows that beat very well. It's also his.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Les drames les plus poignants sont ceux de la pensée" means: the most poignant dramas are those of the thought.


	5. Chapter 5

**On peut braver les lois humaines,**   
**mais non résister aux lois naturelles.**

**.98**

"... and then you know what he did? He called me _mid_ \- uh." He almost chokes. " _Midg_... _midge_..." It seems he can't finish the word. "... that I was, that I looked like a..."

"A _not tall_ person?" Alfons suggests cautiously.

Edward frowns, his lips parted in an angry growl.

To Alfons' immense relief, the next moment, Ed's face slowly relaxes and the tension gives way to a resigned expression. And it looks like he's pulling out a tooth while he confirms: "A _not tall_ person."

  
**.99**

Another taste of days. Hours, minutes. Another taste of stories - told and heard -, another taste of what his brother's face will look like when he's twenty years old - his brother who is alive, because he is, he's not dead, he's alive and Ed will find him - the face of Al and the eyes of Alfons. Another taste of those dreams in which everyone is there, there's Winry, there's Pinako and there's his teacher Izumi with a happy face, Roy Mustang and Lieutenant Hawkeye, Mrs. Hughes holding her daughter and her husband hands, no tombstone was ever built with his name written on it; looking into his house Edward sees his mother's soft ponytail swinging in the kitchen and Hohenheim's long hair right next to her - very close - and Alfons is always with them, always. He never coughs.

Building, walking. Drawing the stars and spending the night talking so as not to let him suffocate from coughing.

This world, a few more days.

**.100**

Evening.

"We could go out and look at the stars," Alfons suggests. "There's not even a cloud."

Tonight the sky is like that of his world, Ed thinks.

They're lying down watching the stars explode in a blue topaz universe: they're dusty, made of moon's crumbs condensed somewhere between the earth and the wind, and seem to draw a long and thin road like an arrow, which points straight to the heart of the universe. The dark wood is lit with fireflies and crickets.

Tonight Alfons is like Alphonse, Ed thinks.

He's there next to him and doesn't cough: he laughs, jokes. He has a gentle voice as always, but more confident than ever, he's as tall as ever, but you can't notice his height if he's lying down. If Ed wanted, he could pretend to have Alphonse beside him, because Al laughs like this, Al jokes like this, Al is like this. But Ed doesn't want to. He wants to remember which of the two Al - _Alfons_ \- explained to him who Orion was, which of the two Al - _Alfons_ \- told him that there was indeed a way in the sky, and it was not made of stars, but milk. It seems that streak of moon dust is made of milk. Yuck.

He wants to remember this moment. Alfons is winding down a little cough at a time and Alphonse is lost on the other side of the stars. It seems to him like he's running towards the twilight of something, a conclusion, a boundary, and he's always too faster than the two of them. _I'm leaving them behind_ , he thinks.

"Can you see those four stars there, Ed? Those which form a kind of trapezoid?"

"It's full of trapezoids, up here..."

"I say those ones. You see them? There are four and then three more..."

"There they are, yes. I got 'em."

"That's _Ursa Majoris_ , Great Bear."

"You got to tell me where is this bear."

"Look, it's just called that, okay? Can you see the two stars at the bottom of the trapezoid? Here, if you join them like this..." Alfons' fingers draw on the sky. "... and then go straight down, you get to touch that big blue star. There, that's the Polar Star. Do you remember? The Polar Star is known as the _North_ Star, it's a kind of sky compass. Travelers used it to find their way home.

The way home. Hearing Al and Winry laughing. Letting Alfons choke here, alone, not having to hear about the cities of the moon anymore.

Edward closes his hand into a fist around the blue star and his clenched fingers swallow that luminous point in the night sky, hiding it.

"And that other star, the big one, what's it called?"

Alfons is five centimeters from him. He breathes slowly.

_I just want some more time._

They lie on the lawn until morning, waiting for the new sun. In the clear blue sky, the dawn will come once again to hide the way to the stars.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "On peut braver les lois humaines, mais non résister aux lois naturelles" means: One can defy human laws, but not resist natural laws.

**Author's Note:**

> \- The concept of Übertragung (eng = transference) was introduced by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic practice in the 1890s.  
> Transference is the unwitting process of projecting one’s feelings toward an important figure in your life (in the past, during his/her childhood) onto someone else.  
> In this case Alfons reminds Ed of his brother.
> 
> \- "La distance est un vain mot" means: Distance is an empty word.
> 
> \- This story is set immediately after the end of the first anime series (2003). Edward got stuck on the other side of the Gate; in Munich, 1921, he tells his father that he will look for professors Goddard and Oberth in Transylvania and, in the last scene, he's seen traveling on a train.  
> In Amestris, Alphonse does the same thing.  
> At the beginning of "Conqueror of Shamballa" Edward has already met Alfons, they have become friends and move together always following their studies on rockets. But what happened before...?  
> I like the atmosphere of that movie (although Ed and Winry end up separated once again) and I wanted to make a tribute to both "the 2003 Edward" and Alfons Heiderich.
> 
> \- I have not added a M/M category because you can read the relationship between Edward and Alfons as you please. I prefer to see a brotherly relationship here.
> 
> \- The convergent-divergent nozzle was actually first used in a rocket engine by Robert Goddard.


End file.
